1

The Naked Woman and the Naked Self:

Two Parables about Bodies, Clothing and Selfhood

Dr. Tiina Allik

I want to begin with two stories about the relationship between selfhood and clothing.

One such story is from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death:

. . . a peasant . . . went barefooted to town with enough money to buy himself a pair of

stockings and shoes and to get drunk, and in trying to find his way home in his drunken state,

he fell asleep in the middle of the road. A carriage came along, and the driver shouted to him

to move or he would drive over his legs. The drunken peasant woke up, looked at his legs

and, not recognizing them because of the shoes and stockings, said: “Go ahead. They are not

my legs.”1

The other story is “The Parable of the Naked Lady”, written by Anne Spurgeon in a

class given by Rosemary Radford Reuther:

The young women gathered round him and one of them asked, “Master, tell us what is the

best image of womanhood that we can become? We feel uncertain about the ways of our

mothers.” And Jesus said to her, “Women, what you ask is something I can not decide for

you.” And he told them a parable, saying: A naked woman sat at the crossroads where the

road that went north and south met the road going east and west. People passed her; some

were ashamed, some were angry, but most looked upon her with disapproval. Some threw

clothes at her -- all different types, colors and sizes. The woman knew she was naked, but did

not lift a finger to cover herself.

There was a woman in a golden gown who stopped her journey and went to the naked

woman saying, “Take my dress. See how beautiful it is, a golden brocade covered with pearls

and diamonds.” She took off the garment and handed it to the naked woman who instantly

2

felt its weight. “This is very heavy,” said the naked woman. The elaborate woman nodded.

“The wearer of that gown must always look beautiful, must always act charming, must

remain still and maintain beauty for her husband. She must constantly display her husband’s

wealth no matter what its cumbrance. She must not lose her figure nor grow old. She must

put up with her husband’s temperament, appetites and decisions.”

“I do not want this dress,” said the naked woman. “Here, take it back.” But instead, the

elaborate woman threw the dress in a heap by the side of the road. She sat down next to the

naked woman.

There was a woman in a simple gray dress who stopped her journey and went to the

naked woman saying, “Take my dress. See how simple it is; it takes no special care and is

easy to move in.” She handed the dress to the naked woman, who felt that its burden was

also great.

“What causes the weight of this dress?” she asked.

“Thankless toil,” said the simple woman. “Years of washing, scrubbing, vacuuming,

diapering, cooking, chauffeuring, arguing, punishing, remembering, organizing and catering.

The wearer of that dress is forever the backbone of her home -- she can never tire, get sick,

leave, be alone or cultivate her own interests. She loses her color and her youth and watches

as her man’s eye looks elsewhere for beauty.”

“Here, take back your dress,” said the naked woman. But the simple woman put her

dress with the golden dress by the side of the road. She sat down next to the elaborate

woman and the two began to argue about whose garment had been the heaviest. The three

women sat at the crossroads.

There was a woman in a short red dress who stopped her journey and went to the naked

woman. “My dress might suit you. It is easy to get in and out of and is very soft and alluring.

Here.” She handed the dress to the naked woman. “Don't be deceived,” said the sensuous

woman. “It too is heavy laden.”

“Why?” asked the naked woman.

3

“The wearer of this dress must bear the burden of frigid wives. She must always be

available for the sexual demands of men. She is the keeper of lies and deceits, and must

endure the hate of women who do not like what she does, but wish they had her power. The

woman who wears this dress must open her legs to feed herself, to clothe herself, to house

herself, and to care for any misbegotten offspring. She must always be soft and sensuous,

bold and enterprising, calculating and owned. She lives with the knowledge that she must

always welcome men who never stay.”

“This dress will not do either,” said the naked woman. “Take it back.” But the sensuous

woman tossed the red dress among the others at the side of the road and sat down next to the

simple woman. She joined in the argument that had not let up.

There was a woman in a long black habit who stopped her journey and went to the naked

woman. “My child,” she said, “you are naked, let me clothe you. Here, take my habit. It is

warm and safe.”

“Safe?” questioned the naked woman. “It’s weight is very great.”

“Yes,” said the holy woman. “It holds the secrets of a hundred thousand souls. One

must be very strong to wear it, but must show that strength in silence and servitude. The

wearer of this habit must understand birth, but never bear; must understand the cravings of

the flesh, but never experience them; must understand the ways of the world, but never be

part of it. The woman who wears this must sacrifice herself constantly for the needs of others

and never fill her own. She must punish herself for thoughts and longings that extend

beyond the confines of cloistered walls.”

“I am neither cold not fearful,” said the naked woman. “Take back you habit.” But the

holy woman placed the habit with the other dresses at the roadside and sat and entered into

the argument that continued between the elaborate woman, the simple woman and the

sensuous woman.

4

There was a woman in a grey suit who stopped her journey and went to the naked

woman saying, “Here, this tweed would look smart on you. Its lines are professionally

tailored to give a serious appearance.” She handed the suit to the naked woman.

“Now why does this garment carry so much weight?”

“Don’t be fooled by its professional appearance. The wearer of this suit must live in the

sterile world and must never be part of any of the worlds you have seen so far. This woman

must never be beautiful and artistic, for that would distract people from the business at hand;

she must never bear children or have any relationship that would slow her progress to the top

of her field. She must never be sensuous, for she would then be the mark of wolves who

would find any way to destroy her and her power. She must also endure being mocked as a

dyke by those who fail to understand the purposes behind her sexlessness. She must never be

holy, for the world of the spirit weakens the power of the world of the rational. It is seen as

foolishness and gets in the way of advancement with its silly notions of ethics and morality.

So the wearer of the dress must remain closed like a prison against all outside forces that

would drain her of her power.”

“Your world is frightening,” said the naked woman. “Take back your suit.” But the

professional woman tossed her suit among the other garments, sat and joined in the

argument, insisting that of all the other garments, hers had been the heaviest.

The women argued beside the naked woman far into the night. At some point their

argument changed from self-pity to blame upon the other. As each experienced the pointed

finger of the others, she began to see that there were things about her dress that were worthy

and good. There were things that each was not ashamed of or encumbered by.

“I know how to enjoy my body, to feel the pleasure of physical love,” said the sensuous

woman.

“Oh, teach me that,” said the holy woman, “and I will teach you the wonder of the quest

for union with God.”

5

“I know how to organize a large business and make it run smoothly, and how to handle

many things in the face of emergency,” said the professional woman.

“Oh, teach me,” said the elaborate woman,”and I will teach you how to make yourself

beautiful so that you can enjoy the appearance of your body.”

“Teach me my attraction also,” said the simple woman,”and I will teach you how to bear

and love a child.”

New life sprang up among the women and they fashioned for themselves garments out of

the clothing that had piled at the side of the road, each unique and sharing parts of each. As

they taught and worked, the naked woman got up and walked to the next intersection east of

them; and sat down.

And Jesus said to the young women, “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.”2

These two stories, through the metaphors of bodies and clothing, depict the relationship

between selfhood and the “externals” of one’s life (including the contingent or accidental

relationships one has with other people; the physical, social, cultural, and political circumstances

of one’s life; and the way in which these contingencies or accidental features leave traces upon

one’s inner world). Despite their differences, both stories illustrate a view of selfhood in which

the core identity of a person is arrived at by means of abstracting the self from externals.

I will begin with a discussion of Kierkegaard’s view of selfhood (based on his book Sickness

Unto Death). Next I will discuss possible interpretations of “The Parable of the Naked Lady” in

light of Kierkegaard’s views. Finally I will provide brief sketches of some psychoanalytic

theorizing that exemplifies an alternative view of the tension between what is “internal” and

“external” to the self and suggest some advantages of such a view.

6

Kierkegaard’s Anthropology

The Sickness Unto Death presents Kierkegaard’s view of the healthy self as a conscious and

responsible relating of one’s finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility, determinateness

and freedom. For Kierkegaard, the healthy self is the process of choosing and maintaining a

tension between these opposing aspects of one’s nature, a process that is possible only through

faith in God.

Despair and sin, on the other hand, are ways of talking about illnesses of the self to which

we are prone. For Kierkegaard, both despair and sin can take the form of either a lack of

acknowledgement of one’s determinateness and one’s limits, on the one hand, or a lack of

acknowledgement of one’s capacity for agency and freedom and the responsible appropriation of

the givens in one’s self, on the other hand. Defiant despair and sin (or masculine despair and sin)

are, in effect, a refusal of one’s determinateness and finitude. The despair and sin of weakness (or

feminine despair and sin) are a refusal of the freedom and agency that are essential to the self.

This is where the story of the peasant comes in. The peasant cannot recognize himself

because he has forgotten that he changed his appearance by putting stockings and shoes on his

feet. He is the “man of immediacy” who identifies his self with externals. For Kierkegaard, he

illustrates the type of person who lacks virtually any reflection or consciousness and thus lacks

selfhood. He is the type of the despair and sin of weakness which lacks inwardness or self-

consciousness.

In Kierkegaard’s analysis of the gradations of despair, the despair of this type of person is

the lowest form of the despair of weakness. According to Kierkegaard, when this type of person

despairs, he wishes to be someone else. In other words, he wants to exchange the externals of his

life for those of someone else. Kierkegaard intends for the story to show how comical the man of

pure immediacy is, since he has mistaken his self for something that has nothing to do with who

he really is. In fact, for Kierkegaard, this kind of person has no self because he/she does not

recognize the eternal in the self.

7

The precondition for a healthy self is the “consciousness of a self that is won by infinite

abstraction from every externality” or a “naked abstract self, which, compared with immediacy’s

fully dressed self, is the first form of the infinite self and the advancing impetus in the whole

process by which a self infinitely becomes responsible for its actual self with all its difficulties and

advantages.”3

Thus the images of clothing and nakedness in Kierkegaard’s story of the peasant and his

subsequent use of the terms “naked self” and “fully clothed self” demonstrate Kierkegaard’s

conceptualization of the inwardness of the self (which for him means the possibility of

consciousness and choice) as something achieved by abstracting the self from externals. For

Kierkegaard, the way out of despair lies through an increase of consciousness and the taking on

of responsibility for oneself. Consciousness and taking responsibility for oneself do not necessarily

lead to a healthy self (they can just lead to the more defiant forms of sin), but they are

preconditions for authentic selfhood.4 And for the self to achieve consciousness and

responsibility involves an abstraction of what is eternal in one’s self from the transient externals of

one’s life.

One might jump to the conclusion that Kierkegaard excludes external (physical, social,

cultural) determinations from having an input into the structure of the self (just as in the story,

one might come to the conclusion that Kierkegaard thinks that clothes are completely irrelevant

to an individual’s selfhood and identity). This is not so. For Kierkegaard, the “naked self”,

abstracted from every externality, becomes responsible for the actual concrete self. The actual

concrete self includes all kinds of externally determined qualities. By reflection, the self abstracts

itself from externals and becomes infinite but also assumes responsibility for the actual, concrete

self.

Benevolently interpreted, it is as if Kierkegaard first has a person remove the clothes from

his/her essential self and then has the person put them back on and say, “I take possession of my

self as both having been given and also in the past having chosen these particular articles of

clothing.”

8

Clothing and Nakedness in “The Parable of the Naked Lady”

In “The Parable of the Naked Lady”, the images of clothing represent the attempts of

women to construct new identities for themselves. At first reading, one might think that this

parable highlights the importance of appropriate clothing as constitutive of one’s selfhood and

identity. However, upon further consideration, the significance of nakedness in the story seems

to be purposefully ambiguous.

In discussions of this parable in undergraduate feminist theology classes, I have found

that the role of the naked lady elicits different kinds of reactions. For some students, the naked

lady is clearly the most attractive role model in the parable. She is a challenge to the status quo

by virtue of her nakedness. She does not soften the impact of her nakedness by joining in the

activity of the other women who first take off their clothes in disgust and anger, fight with each

other, and then start combining bits and pieces of each other’s clothes/social skills and functions.

In effect, she is interpreted by some students as a symbol of ideal purity of identity -- a woman

who has not compromised herself by taking on any of the externals that are a product of our

interactions with others.

For other students, the women who resourcefully patch together more comfortable

identities out of what is available to them in the stereotypical feminine roles of their culture are

the heroines and the potential models to be imitated. These students see the naked woman as a

useful catalyst. She disrupts settled patterns and initiates useful change, but the naked woman,

for these students, is not a model for a possible way of living one’s life in the world.

I am sympathetic to both kinds of interpretations of the parable because I suspect they

come from different patterns of experience of formative interactions with others. The two

interpretations are, I would suggest, motivated by the attempt to find conceptual solutions to

differing kinds of emotional problems.

For many people, including women who have become aware of the liabilities of a

stereotypically feminine personality, relationships to others are perilous, the worst peril being the

9

inability to even see that a relationship is crippling and destructive to one’s selfhood. One can be

tempted, seduced, compromised, restricted, and violated by the expectations of others and by the

social roles available in one’s culture. In such a context, the strength and purity of the self that

abstracts itself from externals and maintains its nakedness as inviolable is understandably heroic

and attractive.

For other people, including women who have become aware of the assets of a

stereotypically feminine personality, the idea of living naked, without clothes, without the

influence of social roles and relationships and the symbolic structures of one’s culture seems

undesirable as well as being an impossibility. For such people, the abstraction of a self from

relationships may buy one independence and freedom, but the existence that one has acquired

seems cold and lonely.

I tend to think that people whose experience has included some benevolent nurturing and

cooperative relationships with others (such as parents, mentors, spouses, and friends) are more

likely to think of who one is as constituted by one’s social relationships in such a way that the self

cannot be extracted from those relationships, whereas those for whom the preponderance of

early relationships with others has been unsupportive of their autonomy, integrity, and separate

agency are more likely to think of one’s identity and selfhood as something that must be won by

extricating one’s self from the temptations and entanglements of relationships.5

Kierkegaard’s dialectical view of the self comprehends both kinds of interpretations of the

parable. In Kierkegaard’s view, the individual needs to divest him/herself of externals in order

to become aware of him/herself as having a self that is eternal. Thus the role of the naked lady

in getting the other women to take off their clothes is essential to their becoming aware of their

selfhood. But, in Kierkegaard’s view, the individual also needs to choose how he/she will live in

relation to the world and to take responsibility for his/her concrete self. Thus the process of the

women arguing and choosing bits of available clothing to clothe themselves is a depiction of the

women piecing together concrete identities and taking responsibility for their concrete selves. In

10

Kierkegaard’s view of the self, both the act of divestiture and the putting on of clothes are

essential to the process of becoming a self.

From a feminist point of view, Kierkegaard’s anthropology is useful, first, because it

points out that being a self is an activity. If one takes the position (as many feminists have) that

women tend towards an excessive acceptance of the determinations made upon their lives by

external others,6 then Kierkegaard’s emphasis on consciousness and on taking responsibility for

one’s self encourages women to take responsibility for their lives by rising above the externals of

their lives. On the other hand, from the point of view of those feminists who value the receptive

and relational aspects of femininity, the danger of an emphasis on taking responsibility for oneself

as a deliberate and conscious activity is that the capacities of women for relating to external

others may be lost in the quest for a transcendent subjectivity and agency that is defined as ever

increasing individuality and separateness.7 Kierkegaard’s dialectic between the self as inwardness

and the self as concrete is thus potentially useful to both types of feminist concerns about the self’s

relation to externals--the concern that women not be submerged in and obliterated by their

relationships to external others and the concern that women not lose their capacity to be sensitive

and receptive to their environment.

However, for me, the main problem with Kierkegaard’s anthropology (and thus also any

feminist use of it) is that it is still a dialectic. What I mean by a dialectic is a model consisting of

two polar opposites that are defined by contrast and exclusion of each other, in this case between

what is external to the self and what is internal.8 The questions that I would address to

Kierkegaard as well as to feminists who would make use of his anthropology are the following: Is

it really necessary or useful to conceptualize what is internal as, essentially and by definition, the

opposite of what is external? Is it possible and perhaps useful to conceptualize some things as

simultaneously both internal and external to the self? In other words, if we understand the

motivation for conceptualizing the self as a “naked self” that also consciously and deliberately

chooses to put on certain items of clothing (the motivation is to achieve a leverage point from

which we can criticize destructive and corrupting effects of relationships on the self), we can also

11

ask whether there are other, perhaps better, conceptual tools by which we can achieve the same

ends.

Psychoanalytic Theory and an Alternative Concept of Selfhood

My own sources for models of the self that skew the modern exclusionary logic between

determinateness and agency--what is external to the self as opposed to internal--are in recent

psychoanalytic theory. The psychoanalytic theorists who break new ground on this issue are, for

the most part, influenced by object relations theory. According to object relations theory, our

selves are put together out of our construals of our relationships with significant others.9 The self

and what is “inside” has its sources in actual early relationships to external others. In infancy

and in childhood, these relationships to external others are not and cannot be deliberately and

consciously chosen (although from the very beginnings of its existence, the infant already has a

temperament and a constitution and thus provides cues and input into the relationships it has

with others). In the course of human development, the infant’s social relationships and its

experience of the external environment is internalized, thereby constituting the structure of its

self. The structure of the self then provides a “set” in the child’s and later in the adult’s

relationships with yet more external others.

The individual’s so-called higher capacities (including the capacities for consciousness as

reflection and deliberate choice) are not exempt from this process. They also are constituted by

means of the individual’s interactions with important others in the early years of development.

As pathological cases demonstrate, there is virtually nothing in human development that is

inevitable, i.e., that cannot be derailed by the failure to provide an environment that nurtures

and facilitates what we take as “natural” and “essential” human capacities. Thus human beings

in their development are like plants and non-human animals; they are thoroughly contingent

and both sensitive and vulnerable to their environment, even as they develop capacities to rise

above, act upon and modify their environment in ways that differ from the ways in which plants

and non-human animals can act upon their environment.

12

Although early childhood is the window of opportunity for the constitution of the self, we

continue to use our encounters with others to revise and restructure our selves in important ways.

The school of psychoanalytic theory known as self psychology, based on the work of the

American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut10 , focuses particularly on how all humans, whether

mentally ill or normal, need the nurturing soil of actual relationships with others to maintain a

healthy sense of self. In self psychological theory, relationships in which one uses others to

regulate one’s sense of self are called selfobject relationships. Narcissistic personalities are

particularly prone to need and, paradoxically, to be unable to use others as selfobjects, but one of

the foundational claims of self psychology is the universality and the normality of our use of other

people, organizations, situations, and even inanimate objects as selfobjects. Selfpsychology is

thus one way of conceptualizing the self as perpetually afloat on the sea of its relationships with

others, and thus permanently capable of being helped and hindered by those relationships.

Those psychoanalytic theorists who emphasize that relationships with others are both

developmentally constitutive of our selves and also continue to be the basis of one’s sense of self

throughout the course of a human lifespan are sometimes referred to as relational theorists.

Some relational theorists show evidence of a conceptual movement towards what I label as a

conceptualization of relationality and individual identity in that they do not construe these two

aspects of human selfhood as necessarily opposites. I will focus on two such relational theorists,

Jessica Benjamin11 and Adam Phillips12 .

Both Benjamin and Phillips rework the persistent dilemma of the developing self with

regard to what is “other” -- a dilemma that is already part of Freud’s hypotheses about the

mental life of infants. Freud assumes that the infant has a primitive fantasy of omnipotence,

which is the corollary to his assumption that the infant is, at first, unable to distinguish between

the ego (which begins as a body ego) and what is external to the ego.13 The infant’s dilemma is

the conflict between a sense of omnipotence and the increasing realization that the external

world and external others are genuinely external, i.e., things over which he/she has little or no

control. One solution to the dilemma is the attribution of omnipotence to the other. Another

13

solution is the persistence of the attribution of omnipotence to the self. The solution that is

necessary, if the infant is going to mature into a relatively healthy adult, is the giving up of the

notion of omnipotence altogether.

Benjamin compares the two pathological solutions as to what to do with the other

(maintaining the sense of one’s own omnipotence versus attributing omnipotence to the other) to

Hegel’s picture of the master/slave relationship.14 The position of attributing omnipotence to

the other is an attempt to find one’s own agency, subjectivity, and desire in the agency,

subjectivity, and desire of the other. This is the masochistic position. The slave subjugates

herself to the master in order to find her own desire in the master’s desire. (The master does not

need to be another person; the master could be contingency or fate.) This position is, in effect, a

subjugation of oneself to external determinants in the attempt to find one’s self through one’s

relationship to these external determinants.

The attribution of omnipotence to oneself is the sadistic position. For Benjamin, the

master must subjugate the slave in order to get confirmation of his omnipotence. The

impossibility of the situation is that, if the master completely subjugates the slave, the slave no

longer has enough subjectivity in order to confirm the omnipotence of the master. In effect, the

sadistic position can slip into a complete denial of the other and the external and thus of one’s

own finite nature and one’s relation to real others.15

One of Jessica Benjamin’s arguments is that, although psychoanalytic theory universally

acknowledges the need for the developing child to give up on the notion of omnipotence, the

model for the development of the individual’s relationships to others is also implicitly based on

the assumption that human beings will not and cannot give up their yearning for omnipotence

and that recognition of others as subjects and agents with whom we can have genuinely mutual

relationships is virtually impossible.16

She contrasts the infant - mother studies of Daniel Stern17 to those of Margaret Mahler18

in order to present a model of relationships where the baseline is not one individual’s assertion of

omnipotence over the other. The main contrast between Mahler’s and Stern’s models for infant

14

development is that in Mahler’s model, the infant starts from a sense of oneness and connection

with the mother and goes through developmental stages in the direction of an increasing sense of

autonomy and separateness. Stern’s model reflects the fact that already in the first months after

birth, one can find evidence that shows that the infant has both a sense of connection with others

and a sense of separateness from others (and thus a primitive notion of “the other”). In Stern’s

theoretical model, both senses develop. In other words, development is not a matter of the sense

of independence gradually wiping out the sense of connnectedness.

On the basis of Stern’s empirical evidence and his theoretical constructions of the infant’s

internal world, Benjamin comes up with a model for the self in which the recognition of the other

as an independent subject and agent is the baseline. This does not mean that the pathological

solutions to the dilemma of what to do with “the other” are not persistent and pervasive.19 It

does mean that conceptually, her model is not skewed towards the inevitability of the

master/slave seesaw.

Adam Phillips talks about the human dilemma of what to do with “the other” in terms of

the process of illusion and disillusionment. “[I]t is as if the infant -- and later the adult -- has

three choices. Either the infant is omnipotent, or the mother is omnipotent, or neither of them

is”.20 Using terminology first introduced by Melanie Klein, he says that the third choice is what

we can call the depressive position which includes “the acknowledgement that there is no such

thing as omnipotence.” Phillips himself wants to suggest (and I concur with him) that there is a

fourth choice “which looks as though it’s somewhere between belief in omnipotence and the

abrogation of that belief -- though in actuality I think it is something quite different.” Phillips

calls this position the acknowledgement of contingency, i.e., of “luck, fortune, accident,

coincidence” or “nonintentional or random agency”.

According to Phillips, this nonintentional agency says nothing about our own power. It

neither enlarges it nor diminishes it.21 From my point of view, that is why those things that are

contingent to our selves as conscious subjects and as agents can both enlarge and diminish our

selves, alternately or sometimes simultaneously. In this picture of the self’s relation to the world,

15

contingency is not the polar opposite of agency and freedom. Rather, contingency can be the

nurturing soil and very foundation of agency. But it can also be something that limits, hinders, or

even totally destroys the possibility of agency.

It is the second role for contingency that has usually dominated our view of it. Nonwilled

and thus contingent influences from both animate and inanimate others are (in what I would

characterize as modern views of human selfhood) thought to compromise our sense of an agency

and subjectivity that is truly our own. In this picture of selfhood, otherness and contingency

inevitably (because the self is defined by excluding them) confront us in an intrusive and violent

way. Consequently, if the acceptance of otherness and of contingency are also deemed

necessary, they are a bitter pill that must be swallowed. In this picture, confrontations with

otherness and contingency force us into positions of resentful and obsequious humility, since,

after all, it is not natural for us to want to acknowledge otherness or contingency.

One of the virtues of Phillips’ discussion is that it brings to the fore the pleasurable

possibilities of contingency. Otherness and contingency can just as easily be conceived of as a

source of pleasure, stimulation, or as an elicitation of desire. An object that is other than my

body and which I do not intentionally manipulate can touch me as a tickle, as a caress, as a

stimulating pressure, as an interesting smell, as an invitation to further contact (or in an infinite

variety of other ways). My relationship to another subject, whom I do not control or manipulate,

can be perceived as a delightful opportunity for a temporary merger of an altogether different

kind, or an opportunity to taste something completely new. Even if my relationships with other

subjects and with contingent circumstances are constitutive of my very capacities to function as a

human person (as they are in early childhood), they can be pleasurable, stimulating, and the

ground for increased spontaneity and creativity, rather than restriction and limitation. In other

words, the fact that they are contingencies and in some sense external or nonwilled (by myself)

does not necessarily make them either nurturing or restrictive.

Particularly relevant from my point of view here is that according to Phillips, in this

fourth position, the view of contingency is as something that is neither external nor internal. I

16

think that the key here is the traditional modern conceptualization of what is external to or other

than myself something as what is “not me”, in the sense of a negation of what is “me”. The shift

to an alternative conceptualizations of selfhood begins with the realization that the relationship

between “me” and “not-me” can be interpreted, on the one had, as negation and opposition or,

on the other hand, as a difference and otherness that does not necessarily include opposition and

negation.

Our experience of what is external and of contingency includes our experience of our

body as well as what is felt not to be the body. The psychological structure of the self can also be

experienced as other and as a frustratingly persistent contingency, if it does not accord with what

we would ideally choose to be. It is these oppositions between what is external and what is

internal to the self that need to be mitigated and revised if one wants to conceptualize human

selfhood as genuinely contingent and as rooted in the realm of created, contingent reality.

Thus the same kind of dilemma as the dilemma of whether to assume the position of slave

or master takes place within the self when one acknowledges elements or aspects of oneself which

seem alien and foreign to oneself as a conscious and deliberate agent. In any view of the self

which acknowledges complexity and the impossibility of complete consistency and conscious and

deliberate integration, there will be an acknowledgement of aspects of the self and impulses and

thoughts that arise as “other” in one’s self. How one deals, both conceptually and emotionally,

with the “other” in one’s self is usually in tandem with how one deals with other people as

external others22.

Conclusions

The picture of the self that is suggested in my brief sketches of some relational

psychoanalytic theorists takes us beyond the conceptual means of defining the self in terms of a

tension between two contrastive polarities (inner, outer; determinateness, freedom; self, other).

As we have seen, for Kierkegaard, the inwardness of the self-conscious self that makes it possible

17

for the self to take responsibility for its concrete self is conceptualized by him as the opposite of a

self that allows itself to be carried along by externals. This means that there is a sense in which

the self as spirit is not contingent, since the sense of self as spirit is defined by means of exclusion

of “external” determining factors.23 What I have been suggesting is that we need a conceptual

schema for selfhood that allows us to fully acknowledge the role of contingency, both as nurturing

and founding human agency and as capable of dealing blows so destructive to the human self

that the capacity for being a subject or agent is curtailed or even destroyed.

1. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A

Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

(hereafter referred to as SUD), Howard V. Hong and Edna H Hong,

eds. & translators (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)

53.

2. Anne Spurgeon, “The Parable of the Naked Lady”, in

Womanguides: Readings Towards a Feminist Theology, Rosemary

Radford Ruether, ed., (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) 248-251.

3. Idem.

4. For an example of a critical analysis of Kierkegaard’s

concept of authentic selfhood as overly focused on consciousness

and deliberate action see Haim Gordon’s “A Rejection of

Kierkegaard’s Monism of Despair” in International Kierkegaard

Commentary 19: The Sickness Unto Death, ed. Robert L. Perkins

(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987) 239-257.

For a positive evaluation of Kierkegaard as implicitly

advocating an ideal goal of the absorption of what is

unconscious into consciousness see C. Stephen Evans,

“Kierkegaard’s View of the Unconscious” in Kierkegaard in

18

Post/Modernity, eds., Martin J. Matustik and Merold Westphal

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) 76-97.

5. See Carol Gilligan and Grant Wiggins, “The Origins of

Morality in Early Childhood Relationships” in Mapping the Moral

Domain, eds., Carol Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, and Jill

McLean Taylor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 116.

6. See Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine

View” in Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, ed.

Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper, 1979,

25-42, [originally published in The Journal of Religion 40

(April, 1960), 100-112].

See also Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s

Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul

Tillich (Lanham: University Press of America, 1980).

7. Catherine Keller in From a Broken Web: Separation,

Sexism and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986) criticizes

Kierkegaard for proposing a transcendent subjectivity that gives

priority to the individual’s separateness from others.

For a criticism of Keller’s reading of Kierkegaard see

Wanda Warren Berry’s “Kierkegaard and Feminism: Apologetic,

Repetition, and Dialogue” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity,

eds., Martin J. Matustik and Merold Westphal (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1995) 110-124.

8. For a definition of postmodernism in terms of the

abolition of the oppositional polarity between freedom and

determinism see Nancey Murphey and James McClendon,

19

“Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies,” Modern

Theology 5/3 (April 1989) 191-214.

Sylvia I. Walsh, in “On ‘Feminine’ and ‘Masculine’ Forms of

Despair” in International Kierkegaard Commentary 19: The

Sickness Unto Death, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer

University Press, 1987) 121-134, offers the opinion that “[i]t

is the integral intertwining of these two components of selfhood

[separateness and relatedness] that Kierkegaard does not

sufficiently recognize and incorporate in his analysis” (133).

I myself am not sure how Kierkegaard might have done this any

better than he has, given the consistently oppositional

dialectic in his anthropology between the inwardness of the self

and the externals of one’s life.

9. Stephen A. Mitchell in Relational Concepts in

Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University

Press, 1988) shows that there are, already in Freud’s writings,

two approaches to explaining the development of the human mind:

one explains the development of the mind as the unfolding of the

contents of the drives. The other explains the development of

the mind as the product of the individual’s interactions with

objects, i.e., with other people, things, and situations in the

environment. Mitchell also elaborates how some recent

psychoanalytic theorists have taken hold of the second of these

two approaches in Freud and developed the concept of object

relating as constitutive of the contents of the mind.

20

10. See Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1984), The Restoration of the Self

(New York: International Universities Press, 1977), and The

Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the

Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders

(New York: International Universities Press, 1971).

11. See Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects:

Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1995) and The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis,

Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1988).

12. See Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts, (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1996 ), On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic

Essays on the Uncommitted Life (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1994 ), and On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

13. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the

Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911) The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,

Volume XII, James Strachey, transl. (London: The Hogarth Press,

1958), 219-220, fn.4 and “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914)

The Standard Edition, Volume XIV, 90-91.

14. See Jessica Benjamin, Chapter Two, “Master and Slave”

in The Bonds of Love , 51-84.

15. There is a clear parallel between Benjamin’s

description of the respective psychological positions of the

21

slave and the master and Kierkegaard’s two categories of the

despair of weakness and the despair of defiance. The despair of

weakness is a losing of oneself (one’s freedom, agency,

subjectivity) in others. Defiant despair, especially in its

strongest, demonic version, is an affirmation of one’s own power

and virtual obliteration of the rest of the world. Thus both of

Kierkegaard’s basic forms of despair are pathological ways of

dealing with the other, i.e., with what presents oneself as

outside the sphere of one’s own agency.

16. Benjamin also argues that the normative model for

masculine sexual identity assumes that the boy will develop and

maintain the illusion of omnipotence over the sexual other and

thus necessarily fail to recognize the sexual other as an

independent subject and agent. In other words, boys are

unconsciously and consciously socialized into a normative role

which is invested with the illusion of the self as omnipotent

whereas girls are unconsciously and consciously socialized into

a normative role in which they attempt to find their omnipotent

agency in the other. This again parallels Kierkegaard’s typing

of defiant despair as masculine and the despair of weakness as

feminine.

17. See Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the

Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology

(New York: Basic Books, 1985).

22

18. See Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergmann, The

Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (New York: Basic Books,

1975).

19. Benjamin addresses criticisms of her theory as being

overly optimistic in Like Subjects.

20. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation 19-20. 21. Ibid. 20.

22. I have discussed the issue of how and why Christian

theologians should strive to conceptualize human personhood in a

way that acknowledges the genuine finitude and persistent (and

nonsinful) nonintegratedness of the structure of the self in

"Religious Experience, Human Finitude, and the Cultural-

Linguistic Model" Horizons, 20/2 (Fall 1993) 241-259, "Human

Finitude and the Concept of Women's Experience" Modern Theology,

9/1 (January, 1993) 67-85, and "Nature and Spirit: Agency and

Concupiscence in Hauerwas and Rahner", The Journal of Religious

Ethics 15/1 (Spring, 1987) 14-32.

23. For a discussion of this issue in modern theological

anthropology see David Kelsey, “Human Being” in Peter C. Hodgson

and Robert H. King, eds. Christian Theology: An Introduction to

its Traditions and Tasks, revised and enlarged ed.

(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 167-93.